'A Good Day to Die Hard'... Or Is It?
by Shannon KeirnanFellas, no date for the evening (or a very accommodating one)? Considering checking out the newest “Die Hard” installment for a testosterone-filled good time?
Consider again, say the vast majority of reviews.
While it’s doing well at the box office (the John Moore-directed “A Good Day To Die Hard” is expected to gross over $40 million for the Thursday-Monday stretch), critics are less enthusiastic.
So should you, as a loyal Bruce Willis fan, see it?
Well, if you don’t go into it expecting “Die Hard” the original… and you’re there for more explosions and less well-structured plot, you may enjoy it.
But… here’s what the critics have to say:
“Part of the charm of this character was the regular-guy resourcefulness he representd. Now he’s weirdly superhuman… ‘A Good Day to Die Hard’ is pointless and joyless.” –Christy Lemire
“The producers keep throwing more money at the franchise, but in this case more is less. Less attention to character, coherence and suspense, the very qualities that made ‘Die Hard’ stand out in the first place.” –Tom Charity
“As the lure of box office dollars became irresistible and ‘Die Hard’ was regrettably turned into a franchise, the humanity and realism that made ‘Die Hard’ so special was eventually replaced. McClane became an unrelatable, unemotive, indestructible killing machine wading through a by-the-books bulletfest—exactly the types of things ‘Die Hard’ had seemed to vanquish… So please, instead of wasting your time and money on garbage like ‘A Good Day to Die Hard,’ do yourself a favor and just rewatch the original so you can marvel at what a truly wonderful movie it is.” –Jonathan Kim
“This is the Magpie School of action filmmaking: Anytime things start to make so little sense that you might lose the audience, just throw something shiny up on the screen to distract… It's difficult to tell if the mildly bemused air Willis carries with him through much of the movie is a character choice or just smug satisfaction that he's actually getting away with getting paid for this.” –Ian Buckwalter
So, will you see “A Good Day To Die Hard?” Or, if you already have… is it worth the ticket price?